Dyson : How One Man and His Machine Conquered Our Homes

176 Pages·1.54 MB·English

by  Iain Carruthers

Great Brand Stories
Dyson
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Great Brand Stories
Dyson
The domestic engineer:
How Dyson changed
the meaning of cleaning
Iain Carruthers
Copyright © 2007 Iain Carruthers
First published in 2007 by Cyan Books, an imprint of
Cyan Communications Limited
119 Wardour Street
London W1F 0UW
United Kingdom
T [phone]
[email protected]
www.cyanbooks.com
The right of Iain Carruthers to be identified as the author
of this work has been asserted by him in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored
in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any
means including photocopying, electronic, mechanical,
recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission
of the rights holders, application for which must be made
to the publisher.
A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN-13 978-1-904879-79-4
ISBN-10 1-904879-79-9
Designed by Rick Sellars
With thanks to Dyson for the photographs
Printed and bound in Great Britain by

TJ International Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
For Mia and Kate. This is all about Mr Dynamite.
Acknowledgments
Many people have helped me in putting this together. I’d
particularly like to thank those who gave of their time and
insight: Jeffre Jackson (www.pinkair.com), Russell Davies (www.
russelldavies.com) and Bill Critchley, the late Alan Fletcher,
John Kearon of BrainJuicer, Malcolm Evans and Fiona McNae
of Space Doctors, and Graham Capron-Tee—as well as those
who preferred not to be named, within and outwith Dyson.
At Dyson, I’d particularly like to thank Kirsten Gower, (and, later,
Lucy Grimster and Guy Lambert) who shepherded me through
the organization, as well as my interviewees there—service
teams, engineers and executives.
At Cyan, Martin Liu, Pom Somkabcharti and Rick Sellars
have been responsive and inventive in equal measure.
Thank you.
Contents
Preface 8
Chapter 1
Domestic Engineering 13
Chapter 2
It Either Works or It Doesn’t 25
Chapter 3
The Good Life: 47
Sanctuary and Domestic Weaponry
Chapter 4
The Adventure 67
Chapter 5
The Entrepreneur’s Story 85
Chapter 6
Growing Up and Going Abroad:
1997–2005 101
Chapter 7
The Productive Narcissist 121
Chapter 8
M arketing: 141
The Dyson Way
Coda A Life Less Ordinary 167
Endnotes 174
Bibliography 176
Preface
Dyson is one of those brands that would rather not be called
a brand. It feels more comfortable in being a product or a
number of products. It has marketing managers who deny the
b-word’s existence in the Dyson lexicon. But a brand exists in
someone else’s head, so struggle against the notion as those
managers might, the Dyson brand pulses powerfully inside the
heads of millions of people worldwide. And, of course, Dyson
makes great products.
There is a philosophical debate that is threaded through this
book. What is a brand? Is the brand “he”, “it” or “they”? Here
is a brand, product, company built around the personality and
work of one man—isn’t it, isn’t he, aren’t they? Business is often
seen differently if you change one simple pronoun. People
have been too ready to dehumanize business life and turn it
into a corporate undertaking. Iain Carruthers believes that’s a
grave mistake. And so, I suspect, does James Dyson.
So, to reassert the vital human credentials of business life,
Iain Carruthers is happy to demonstrate that brands are about
stories. The Dyson story, and the purity of attitude that James
Dyson himself embodies, is a challenge for anyone who works
in branding. It is an archetypal story in itself, about an engineer
who strives ambitiously for perfection. Any number of Greek
myths spring to mind but Dyson himself is determinedly
unheroic.
Iain Carruthers tells the story well. He connects the

contemporary world of marketing with the archetypal world
of storytelling. Cutting-edge research techniques encounter
the narrative theory of Joseph Campbell. It makes for a heady
brew, one that stimulates rather than sedates. As you read,
questions are raised, to explore the central question of the
debate: what is a brand? This question is the book’s narrative
9 Preface
impulse. The story develops by pursuing that question and
others that spring from it, such as why do we invent brands,
and how can they be used to disguise indifferent products as
well as to illuminate great ones. By the end, you are content
to form your own answers. It’s an enjoyable pursuit.
John Simmons
Series editor, Great brand stories